Part Time Dad, Full Time Love

A MESSAGE TO ALL SEXUALLY ACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE!!

Anybody that knows me, knows how I love sports cars.  I have 1:18 scale models all over my office, I have a huge Hotwheels collection and my desktop wall paper changes every 30 seconds to images of all my favorite rides.  I have been collecting them for years.  From the time I was a small child, cars were my world!!  I would always talk about owning a Lamborghini, Ferrari or a Porsche once I got older.  I would draw them and you could just about bet that I would have at least one in my pocket.  For my career, I was going to be a stuntman and travel to exotic locations to do stunts for big movies and that was going to be how I paid for my exotic car habit and my way of traveling the world.  Well, as many of you know (and for those that don't), I am not a stuntman and I do not have a fleet of expensive cars.  To date, I am still wishing, because instead of following my dreams, I chose to become a father.  Now, being a father isn't a bad thing at all, in fact, I love it, but when you are only 19 years old when you become one, it kind of pours a little salt in your game.  So, instead of doing the things I wanted to do, I have spent my entire life doing the things I have to do to take care of my child.  See, no one really ever told me in detail why I should have waited to become a father.  I didn’t know about all the pitfalls of doing it in the wrong order, all I knew was I wanted a family.  I wanted to be a father and I was successful.

When I was younger, condoms were given to me as protection from getting a disease, not really about protection from pregnancy. So I used them sometimes, but not with my girlfriend.  I was the eldest of all my siblings and the only boy.  My father was deceased and my uncles were there, but I didn’t live with them.  So in a sense, I was flying blind (for lack of better terms).  My mom did the best she could with informing me, but she is a woman and the information I needed should have come from a wise and experienced man.  When you don’t have a male role model in the house to follow as a boy, it creates a void in your perception of how the order of things should be.  Before a baby ever comes along there should be stability.  PERIOD.  No questions asked and no exceptions.  You should go to school, get your education, travel learn to manage money, get your credit right and have a wife.  Do all the things you want while you are only responsible for you before you EVER consider starting a family.  Get all the play out of your system.

Most of us have been taught in one form or another to do this family thing backwards.  We go out and create the family and then try to figure out how to provide for it.  To put blunt, this shit is stupid.  That is like building a beautiful house with everything you want in it and THEN going out and trying to find a foundation to sit it on.  THE FOUNDATION SHOULD BE LAID FIRST!!  If it is not, how do you expect the house to stand firm and secure?  Growing up I was never really told that and I never saw it in action.  Don’t get me wrong, I had a great childhood, but some of the tools I needed to move on properly to the next level, I didn’t get.  Of course I have happily married family members that have been together for years, but I didn’t live with them so I never learned the process of how to become the man of the house and provider from a an actual man.  All I knew was I liked what I saw and I wanted a family of my own.

When I first became a father, I had nothing.  I had some clothes, a piece of a car and some really good intentions, but you cannot raise a family with those things.  I had a job, but it was nothing to run home and brag about.  What I didn’t realize was I was setting myself of for a life of struggle.  As a result, I have spent the latter part of my adulthood doing the things I should have done long before I ever considered fathering a child.  I should have had a plan.  I should have had great credit, a home (not an apartment), reliable transportation, a career or a business, money in the bank and again I say a damn wife.  But when you’re only a kid, all you can do is play house.  Now that I am grown, I want a home and all the things that preceded this are now major obstacles.  My first bad bad credit, car repossession, child support case and bankruptcy are a direct result of my ignorance of the family building process and the proper order of things.

If you look around today, that is still exactly what you see...millions of kids who wanted to be grown and play house.  So many people have put the carriage before the horse.  They have built the house, but have not even begun to lay the foundation.  This is why we have so much baby daddy and baby momma drama.  This why we have so many broken homes that where never actually homes to begin with.  This is why we have all these child support issues.  What do you expect when you put two kids together who have nothing?  They are watching all of their child free friends living it up and they want a piece of that fun.  Too bad because now they have a mouth to feed and they live in separate homes with their parents.  Look at your life for a moment.  Does this situation describe you?   If it doesn’t, I am sure you know someone this does describes to a tee.  I do.  Hell, I am the poster child for this scenario.  

Now I have grown up and I want a real life, but all those past bones are flying all around me and hitting me upside the head.  I want to find some place to put this foundation-less home I have built, but nothing is working the way I would like.  I am trying to be a good parent, provider, loving spouse, entrepreneur and all the while carrying this huge structure on my back that should have been built and secured long before any of this family stuff came into play.  I made my life so much harder.  Before I was being daddy, I should have been being Derek.  I should have gotten all my ducks in a row while I was young and then began to build myself a foundation to start this home on, but I didn’t.  I, like so many others have screwed my life up because I lacked direction and proper guidance.  I created my own chaos.

When you are young, love and lust are very similar in nature.  Both offer a feeling of bliss and happiness, but only one is designed for the long term and just for the record, it is not lust.  My children were not conceived from lust, but there are many that have been (among other foolish things).  This is where the problem comes in, when you are young, since love and lust are so similar in nature, you don’t know the difference.  Then when the lust wears off, you have this new baby involved and the act of playing house starts all over again...with someone new.  This begins the string of baby momma’s and baby daddy’s because everyone is looking for love, but lust has a tendency to show up first and screw things up if you don't recognize it for what it is.

As I look back over my life, I now see where I made my mistakes and its my goal to share this information hoping that it will touch at least one young soul.  I have already started with my own children.  See, at 42 years old, I am still recovering from the errors in judgement I made at the young age of 19.  It is not impossible to get your life back on track, but you really don’t have to make it harder than it needs to be.  Life is supposed to be fun.  You should want to live and not just merely exist.  When you are just existing, your life lacks the meaning that it should have.  The things you do, are only to get by and make it to the next day, not because you love it.  But when you are able to truly live, life takes on a whole new meaning.  You do things you've never done before.  You see things you’ve never seen before.  You go places you’ve never been before.  When all you have to take care is you, the world becomes your playground.  Nothing should feel out of reach.  Then once you are old and wise enough and ready to have kids, you can teach them how to do it...the right way.  You can truly enjoy being a parent with no regrets.  When it is done right, no one will have to do without.  However, when it is done out of order, everyone involved suffers.

For years I thought it was child support ruining my life, but in reality, it was me that had done the damage. Not the system or anyone else.  Just me.  I made the choice to lay down and make my children.  No one held a gun to my head or threatened me, it was a choice.  I love my kids and I wouldn’t trade them for the world, but what I should have done is wait until I had things in place before I had them. I did them a huge injustice.  I am not saying the my life has just been horrible, but I know for a fact if I had known the other path, it would have been so much easier.  I was my worst enemy.  All over this country young boys and girls are becoming their own worst enemies and they don’t even see it.  Their parents don’t see it either because they have done it themselves, just like the generations before them.  If we don’t begin to teach our children how to live and do things in the proper order, this situation will never change.  Why play house?  There are so many other things that our young people can focus on that does not include making babies while they are still babies.  We cannot prevent them from having sex, but what we can do is point them in the right direction and give them the proper tools and info on what it takes to build a family and why they should wait.  There are tons of things out there that our children don’t even realize exist.  They have no idea of the power and freedom they have when it is just them and they need to know that.  All the music they hear, all the shows they watch are all geared towards relationships and sex.  Our children are being setup and don’t even realize it.  Most of the parents don’t even realize it for that matter.  Don’t let our children become their own worst enemy.  I am living proof that one bad decision as a kid can and will follow you for many, many years to come.